Mercedes Lackey - Sleeping Beauty

As she entered the tunnel through the thorns, she heard a bestial roaring that sounded more as if it had come out of a bear's throat than a human's. And just as she was within sight of an open door —

The vines shrieked in a high-pitched cry that sounded like nothing she had ever heard in her entire life. She had to clap her hands over her ears, and she bent over double; the terrible sound cut through her head like a knife, bringing tears of pain to her eyes. The vines shook with a convulsion that nearly brought the entire tunnel down around her.

For a moment her heart leapt into her mouth as the vines thrashed uncontrollably. Something was killing them — but if they broke through the barrier of their own dead, they could still impale her and the unicorn. Then the scream cut off abruptly, leaving behind an echoing silence.

And with another convulsion they all straightened, pointing skyward. Then they abruptly shivered into black, bitter dust. The dust went everywhere, and she found herself coughing desperately to rid her lungs of it. Dashing her hand across her eyes to clear them, Lily ran the last few feet to the open door, and froze at the gory vision that she had stumbled into.

The first thing she saw was Prince Desmond, quite dead, grotesquely pinned to a table by a sword. His eyes stared sightlessly at her, his face bearing a strange expression of surprise.

The second thing she saw was Siegfried cradling a near-fainting Rosa in his arms, touching her face and kissing her, both covered in blood. Her heart nearly stopped.

Then as they both looked up, she realized it was nottheir blood, and her heart started again. "Godm — " Rosa exclaimed, reaching for her.

And the Huntsman rose up from the table, face made with rage, a sword in one hand, a meat cleaver in the other.

Lily froze. Siegfried had his back to the Huntsman and couldn't see him. Rosa was looking at her. In another second, the Huntsman would —

The unicorn shouldered her aside and charged the Huntsman, uttering a high-pitched scream of fury.

The Huntsman laughed and dodged, so that the unicorn hit him with her shoulder instead of her horn. She whirled on her hind feet and charged again. He neatly stepped aside at the last minute and parried her horn with the sword. This time the cleaver came down on her neck, inflicting what had to be a mortal wound. The unicorn made a gurgling sound and went to her knees, scarlet blood pouring down her neck, and the Huntsman turned on Siegfried, who flung himself between the Huntsman and Rosa, searching frantically for a weapon.

"Lily! Throw me! Throw my mirror!" Jimson shouted from her pocket, breaking her paralysis. Without even thinking, her hand went to her pocket almost of its own accord, and as the Huntsman raised the sword for another fatal blow aimed at Siegfried, she threw the mirror with a snap of her wrist, sending it spinning for him.

She hit the Huntsman squarely in the face with the edge of the mirror. And it was the Huntsman's turn to scream. The mirror shattered into a cloud of coruscating motes and a deafening explosion, half blinding her for a moment, and the Huntsman went down on his knees.

Then the cloud condensed back into the shape of the mirror again; the mirror clattered to the floor.

But — it was not Jimson's mirror, with the clear glass and the gold frame. It was a mirror with a sinister, tarnished black surface, and a frame of rotting wood and verdigris-greened bronze.

Lily ran for the mirror and snatched it up. "Jimson!" she whispered, her voice catching in her throat with fear. What had happened?

But what looked back at her out of the mirror was not Jimson.

It was the Huntsman. The Huntsman, as she had never seen him. His face was contorted in a rictus of terror, his mouth open in a silent scream, as two skeletal blackthings seized him by the shoulders. He glanced at one of them, and turned his gaze back to her, clawing at the surface of the mirror frantically. His captors were inexorable. His face receded into the black depths, mouth still open in a scream she was glad that she could not hear, as they hauled him down, down, and at last, were gone. Then there was only the mirror, black and empty. "Jimson?" she sobbed. Where was he? What had happened to him?

"I'm — here, Lily," said a hoarse voice beside her, and she looked down, startled. What looked up at her might have been wearing the Huntsman's clothing, his body even — but the face?

The face was Jimson's.

Before she could even begin to react to that, Siegfried's frantic call dragged her attention back to the three against the wall. "Godmother! You must help Leopold! He's dying!"

She stumbled over to them, but from the Prince's pallor and his shallow, catching breaths, it was obvious that there was nothing she could do in time. "I — I'm not a healer," she said helplessly. "He's hurt more than I can mend — I can't help him — "

"I...can..." coughed another voice. Bleeding terribly from the wound in her neck, the unicorn lurched to her feet and staggered the three steps it took to get to them, falling to her knees beside them all. With a last effort, she flung her head across Leopold's chest so that her own wound bled into his.

"Fweewy...given..." she gasped.

As the light in her beautiful golden eyes faded, she sighed once. Then she was gone.

Leopold opened his eyes with an effort at the sound of hoarse sobs. It was not something he had expected to do, actually. He should have been dead. He couldn't imagine why he wasn't dead. He knew he had taken a fatal wound, and a moment ago the world had been fading away around him. He couldn't imagine why now he was feeling better by the moment.

"Lie still," said the Godmother — how had she gotten there? — with a firm hand on his shoulder. "You're still healing." Healing? And then he saw past her.

He could only lie there in bewildered wonder, watching Siegfried cry with terrible grief as he cradled the head of the dead unicorn in his arms.

The balcony was a good two stories above the crowd, and as Lily looked down on the sea of faces below her, for the first time in her life she experienced a great deal of trepidation. She glanced to the side, where Jimson stood in a uniform the Brownies had designed especially for him. Not overornamented, not overelaborate, and, she hoped, not uncomfortable. In black, of course, to match "Queen Sable's" ubiquitous black, for Jimson was the Queen's personal Guardsman so far as anyone other than Siegfried, Rosa and Leopold knew. His slightly pointed ears, that betrayed him as some form of Fae, were hidden beneath a helmet.

Lily still was not sure what had happened when the mirror hit the Huntsman. Jimson just got thin-lipped when she asked, and said, "Let's just say that under certain rare circumstances, someone evil's fate can catch up with him — and that allows for an exchange between our world and yours. I hadn't planned on that, though. I had only planned to drag him over into my world, where he couldn't threaten you anymore."

Well, whatever had happened, she was grateful for it.

She should have known that Jimson was Fae of some sort, though. After all, he had been alive longer than she had.

She held up her hand where he could see it, and they both watched it shake.

"It's called stage fright, my love," he said, quietly. "Don't worry, everyone gets it."

Well, that was comforting. Sort of.

This was her own fault, really; she had wanted to address the largest number of the people of Eltaria that she could to cut down on rumors and wild stories, and this was the result. She would just have to tell the butterflies in her stomach to settle down, grit her teeth and get through it.

She took a deep breath, and with a gesture hidden from those below, invoked the spell that would allow her voice to project to the farthest point of the crowd. It was a good thing that the Palace had been built with a view to making mass addresses like this, because otherwise she had no ideawhere in the Kingdom it could be done. But she, Jimson, Rosa and Siegfried all stood on the seldom-used East Balcony, and there was nothing in this direction but acres of practice fields and lawn. Not that long ago, those fields had held a small army of adventurers vying for Rosa's hand. Now they seemed to hold every man, woman and child in Eltaria.